Fast-paced parkour offers outlet for Iranian women

AFP, TEHRAN

Women practice parkour in Tehran’s Tavalod Park on March 13.

Photo: AFP

In a Tehran park, a group of young women brave sneering men and shocked looks as they perform flips, mid-air somersaults and bound from pillar to pillar in a surprising sight in a conservative Islamic country.

The group has discovered parkour, the fast-moving sport blending acrobatics and gymnastics that has become their outlet for evading social constraints and dealing with stress.

“As a woman, it’s a bit complicated,” says their teacher Maryam Sedighian Rad, a 28-year-old who holds a master’s degree in physiology.

She and the others wear the hijab obligatory in Iran, which requires women to cover their hair and much of their body in loose clothing to prevent their figures being seen, and her group often has a male escort when they practice outside to ward off unwelcome company — and sometimes police.

Born in France in the late 1980s, parkour involves getting around or over urban obstacles, with a fast-paced mix of running, jumping and gymnastic rolls and vaults.

Offering a cocktail of excitement, danger and risk, it caught on around the world thanks to blockbuster movies such as Yamakasi and District B13. Now it has gained a foothold in Iran — and not only among the usual young male aficionados.

Sedighian Rad and about 50 women — teenagers and young adults — are among the hundreds of Iranians practicing the non-competitive discipline that morphed from military obstacle-course training into a mainly urban sport.